Question

Sometimes, I have to work with not well formed xml (without root). So I take the first node name (In this case “error”) and make up a regex pattern: "</error>$" The problem is it matches true with the following string. (</error> is the end of the line)

<error>0</error>

<roles>
    <role rid="12" title="User" description="Hello world"></role>
    <role rid="11" title="Admin" description="Hello world2"></role></roles>

After looking at some reference I tried to do so </error>\z and </error>\Z. but it doesn’t work.
Please help me with the solution

P.S. If there are better solution, I’ll be really happy. Target environment is javascript.

Answer 1

If the only thing that makes your XML not well-formed is that it’s missing root, then the fix is simple – just add some root element and then parse that and work with it as normal XML.

xml = '<root>' + xml + '</root>';

You really shouldn’t try to parse XML with regular expressions.